7 Jul
2011
7 Jul
'11
1:27 a.m.
William Donzelli [wdonzelli at gmail.com] wrote (and quoted):
I'd agree that manuals on fiche (almost?) all existed as paper copies
to start with. As for survival rates, I don't know. Most FS engineers
would have had a copy of (some) fiche and the larger sites (PDP-10)
would have had the relevant fiche available there too (according to
one of the fiche guides I have). So where fiche has survived at all,
then there is a set of manuals etc. that has quite probably survived
intact. Paper manuals take a lot more storage and degrade more quickly
so I'd expect those to be much more prone to head for recycling.
As for accuracy of records, if people index what they have and
make the list available then it becomes possible to compare
records and spot anomalies (isn't that how Project Guttenburg
does its proof-reading?). There are also index fiche which list
the fiche in that library at that time: scanning and OCRing and
proof-reading those is considerably less burdensome than scanning
an entire library.
Antonio
arcarlini at iee.org
We cannot know
till we catalog and people search and find only the
fiche copy Its most important that cataloging is done at an early
stage and done well enough that it is findable, an ocr'd scan/photo
or manually typed index of any docs that have
faults in the part numbers will be hidden from all but the people who
correctly mistype the part number
I would think that everything available on fiche was
originally, and more commonly, available on paper.
How well the paper survived is a matter of discussion.